


Happy Ending

by hafren



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-20
Updated: 2009-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Travis dies. Then his troubles really begin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Ending

The gunshot didn't kill him. Toppling back, spinning in that deep, echoing well, he had time to review his life, to come to terms with death and wonder what might lie beyond it.

He didn't. No-one does. He had a few coherent if unproductive thoughts, like _I've been shot_ and _fuck, I'm falling_. Then a whirl of disconnected images and then nothing.

When consciousness returned there was one brief, heady moment of thinking _I made it somehow; I'm still alive_. But almost at once, he knew he was not. He was conscious in a completely different way; he could see, with great clarity, the whole world around him, but he knew it could not see him. Among the things he could see was Blake, heavily bandaged but plainly still alive, and he was obscurely aware that this ought to matter very much, for some reason. But it didn't, not now. Nor did the cosmic battle he saw going on somewhere in the distance, as if behind glass. _I started that_. But he couldn't think why any more.

It was getting further away, the people smaller, like those you see from a rising aeroplane. He felt as if he were being carried along. As if he were in a river, not swimming but letting the current take him. It flowed swiftly; he lay back and enjoyed the feel of things not mattering. Ahead of him stretched an ocean of light. He was flowing towards it and he knew that when he reached it he would dissolve and become part of it. Maybe, one day, bits of him would reshape into something else, but for now all he wanted was to reach the light and die into it. Not to matter. He had forgotten even his name.

And then, suddenly, he wasn't moving any more. He felt resistance, as if he'd caught on something in the river. And the ocean of light was drawing away; he ached as he saw its comfort denied him. His name came back. Travis. It tasted bitter. The world was getting closer, the people growing and coming into focus. One, in particular, was becoming painfully sharp and clear. She was standing on a factory production line, fitting components together as they passed on a conveyor belt. As he watched, she straightened up painfully, shifting from foot to foot as if she'd been standing for hours, and he saw her face.

He knew her instantly, would have known her anywhere. He'd only ever seen her once in his life, and then she'd been years younger and better looking. She had aged badly, which was hardly surprising. A number was tattooed across the troubled frown of her forehead; her hands were red and blistered and she wore the shapeless overall of the slave grades. And she mattered. Desperately. Something in him reached out.

As she straightened to ease her back, her hands had kept working automatically. But as he felt himself go out to her, she paused and looked up, as if she sensed something, and a couple of the component sets got by her. A man he hadn't noticed before, walking up and down the line, spotted them.

"Watch what you're doing, you stupid cow!" The overseer's voice was angry but his eyes lit up, pleased with the chance to harangue, to punish. Coming level with the woman, he grabbed her shoulder roughly and raised his other hand. It froze in mid-air; indeed the man was suddenly racked with shivers, as if all of him were freezing. He stayed rigid, like one possessed, for long moments, while the slaves on the line stared open-mouthed, their hands still busily moving. Then something seemed to let go of him; he gasped and moved unsteadily off. The woman had already regained her composure and went on with her work. I enjoyed that, Travis thought. For a moment he had been the essence of cold, flooding the man's mind and bloodstream, tasting again the pleasure of causing fear.

Flowing with that current towards the sea of light, for a little while he had been out of time. Now he was trapped in it again, time had never seemed to go so slowly. The shift seemed to last forever and he dared not try to make her conscious of him again in case she got into more trouble. When at last a hooter sounded, the women - they were all women - filed out of the factory and headed for a squat, dilapidated building, presumably an accommodation block. They walked in an exhausted shuffle, heads down, and did not speak.

When they got to the block they queued in a canteen, where they ate bowls of thin-looking soup, still in almost total silence. He was getting alarmed: suppose they slept in dormitories? How would he get to be alone with her? But to his relief, they headed for cubicles, each little wider than the single bed it contained, but separate. She sat down on the bed and eased her heavy, clog-like shoes off.

He spoke, uncertain what the result would be. "Can you hear me?"

She spun round in alarm.

"Please. Don't be afraid. I don't want to hurt you." The words sounded odd in his mouth; he couldn't recall when he had last not wanted to hurt someone. Yes he could. It was why he was still here. She was stiff with fear. "I… I'm a… " He couldn't say the damn word; it made him feel like a walking cliché. "I'm dead. I'm going to try to make you see me. All right?" She nodded slowly, accepting it. He wondered what else she had seen and accepted in the last few years to make her so phlegmatic. He concentrated on the essence of himself, thinking himself visible. She gave a little gasp and flinched, but then steadied herself and said, "Commander Travis."

His heart turned over. "That's just what you did the first time you saw me. I came in the door and your eyes went wide and you stepped back. But then you got control and spoke as if nothing looked odd."

She nodded, her eyes fixed on his face. "My husband brought you home for tea, while you were convalescing. He wanted to convince you that people wouldn't be staring at you all the time. He'd warned us what you looked like but it was still a bit of a shock. I'm sorry I couldn't quite hide it."

He remembered how natural she had been all through the meal, not avoiding his eyes but not staring either. How her young son had gazed in envy at the arm and asked his father, "Can you make one for me too?" and how they'd laughed and felt easier. He tried to recall her given name. Lina, Lisa, something like that, but he couldn't. So he used the name by which he'd always thought of her.

"Mrs Maryatt, I never forgot that your husband saved my life, that you were kind to me. I thought I had; that it didn't matter…. but it must have. I think that's why I'm here."

"Mrs Maryatt," she said softly, "nobody's called me that for years." She touched one finger to the number on her forehead and for a moment he felt the shape he had taken disintegrate into pure rage, an explosion of hot colours. She gasped.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. It wasn't you I was angry with."

"There was always a lot of anger in you. I sensed it that night."

"I was angry then with the man who maimed me. I wanted revenge on him, more than anything. And some time later I was offered the chance of it."

He paused, waiting for some question or sign of interest, but she seemed beyond being curious about other people's stories. He went back to hers.

"Mrs Maryatt, I know your husband was posted as a deserter, that's why you and… why his family was enslaved. But he wasn't. A deserter, I mean. He didn't."

She glanced up. "No? What happened, then?"

"He was on a ship that blew up. Was blown up. It was another man they were after… look, it's hard to explain but it was politics; someone high up in the Federation wanted something and they needed that ship destroyed to get it. It wasn't personal."

Her brow furrowed, sorting it out. "He just happened to be on it?"

"Yes."

"And that didn't stop them? Knowing he'd die?"

"No."

Her face hardened; suddenly she looked nearly as angry as he'd felt a few moments back. "You. Were you part of it?"

"No. I swear I neither did it nor could have stopped it. I had no knowledge of it until afterwards."

"Why did they post him as a deserter?"

His shape wavered again, though the feeling that threatened it this time was not anger. He desperately wanted to be invisible. "They had to cover up what had happened." She nodded, accepting it, but he had to tell her the rest. "I knew what would happen to you and the children. I don't know if I could have stopped it, because she - the person who did it - was utterly ruthless. But I could have tried. And I didn't, because she was offering me the chance of revenge."

"And that mattered more."

"Yes."

She didn't look surprised or indignant; she had got used to not mattering. "Did you get your revenge, before you died?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know. It doesn't seem important any more."

"Bit of a waste all round, then," she said dryly, and sighed. "Look, we only get six hours and I need to sleep. You won't … still be here, will you, when I can't see you?"

"No. I promise. But I'll be back tomorrow. I'll work out some way to help you and the children. Where are they, anyway?"

She hugged her thin shoulders. "My daughter works on another line. She's on nights; I see her sometimes when the shifts cross. She… she doesn't look well. Where she works, they say there's a lot of dust there, and it gets in the lungs. She coughs a lot."

He gestured at her blistered hands. "Did the dust do that too?"

"No. The things we put together are coated in some chemical or other."

He wondered why they didn't use robots for such work, and then realised the likes of her came cheaper. "What do you make there?"

She stared at him. "How would I know? The damn things go on down the line; do you suppose I care what happens to them next?"

"No." He wondered if they ended up as something he used - had used. Then he remembered the question she hadn't quite answered. "Where's your son?"

Her face crumpled in grief. "He worked in the mines. He died in a rock fall, last year."

"What?" It winded him; he couldn't believe he had heard correctly. "But… you mean… I can't put things right for you?"

She gave him a look of exasperated contempt. "Did you ever think you could?"

The restless remains of his being spent the night stalking the corridor, where the overseers prowled, occasionally opening the unlockable cubicles and raping whoever took their fancy. Only nobody did, that night, because a constant feeling of extreme cold and crawling terror does nothing for the libido. In the morning he found the daughter, who was as ill as her mother feared and surely would not survive many more years unless he could get her work changed. And he found a graveyard, but not the marker he was looking for. Probably they had not bothered to bring up the body. Maybe they wouldn't have marked the grave anyway.

He is still there. It is remarkable how little a ghost can actually do about anything, other than give people an uneasy feeling. True, several of his former acquaintance are plagued with dreams that urge them to reopen an old file. They put them down to stress. He was hoping the political chaos after the battle might offer an opportunity for change but frontier planets go on much as usual whatever's happening at the centre, and the same scum always floats to the top. His impotent rage did manage to kindle a mysterious fire which knocked out a good part of the factory and led to major work reassignments. Indeed some of the slaves were simply culled, there being no work for them, but the mother and daughter ended up slightly better off.

Sometimes it occurs to him that if only they'd died, he might be free. But he is not sure that would be so, and anyway he can do nothing about the fierce attachment that binds him to them, and to their world that he longs so much to be done with. They matter to him, and as long as they do, he is trapped, not by the many evil things he did but by the one good thing he wanted to do and didn't.

There is a happy ending, in an ocean of light. It's just that he can't get to it.


End file.
